March is Women’s History Month, and to celebrate we’re diving deep into the history of the influential women who helped build the Minnesota music scene with a series on Local Current and an all-female edition of The Local Show on Sunday, March 15. For the first hour-long installment on Local Current, I wanted to go back just…

After helping hip-hop megastar Kanye West debut new song “All Day” last week, Allan Kingdom is making headlines around the world. Few rappers get the chance to collaborate with hip-hop’s self-proclaimed savior, so this support from West means a lot—and as we learned on Tuesday, Kingdom didn’t just help Kanye in the song’s live performance but…

Happy Friday! Here’s your look at some of the latest music videos to surface in the Minnesota music scene, starting with the first release from UMAMI in over two years… UMAMI After performing off and on for a few years and taking a lengthy hiatus to record new music, UMAMI are back—and they have a mind-bending,…

Further fueling their comeback—and reports of a possible new album—the Replacements are reissuing their eight studio releases (seven albums and one EP) as a box set on Rhino. The Complete Studio Albums 1981-1990, set for release on April 14, will contain Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981), Stink (1982), Hootenanny (1983), Let It Be (1984), Tim (1985), Pleased to…

Kurt Cobain‘s childhood home in Aberdeen, Washington is on the market for $400,000. According to the real estate agency handling the sale, the home still bears marks from Cobain’s childhood—literally, in the sense of drawings he made on the wall and a hole he punched with his fist as a teenager. (Reuters) The most famous…

The World Health Organization recommends limiting sugar intake to 25 grams per day 'for additional health benefits'. But because music is calorie-free, what songs that mention 'sugar' or 'sweet' do you want to hear for today's Coffee Break?

When a colleague saw I was editing an audio recording called “Peter Asher,” he gasped. “Wow!” he said. “The Peter Asher?” Yes, indeed: the Peter Asher. Best-known as the “Peter” of Peter and Gordon, Asher has enjoyed a remarkable career in music that’s encompassed work as a producer and manager—perhaps most notably as a significant force in…

A just-released trailer for Sufjan Stevens‘s upcoming tour features previously unheard music from his forthcoming album Carrie & Lowell. The much-anticipated album, Stevens’s first since 2010’s The Age of Adz, is named after Stevens’s mother and stepfather and concerns, according to a press release, “life and death, love and loss, and the artist’s struggle to make sense…

When Star Tribune reporter Libor Jany tweeted a photo of Prince‘s high school basketball team, he couldn’t have guessed it would go viral—after all, the photo was already published in the newspaper, in 1984. National blogs loved the rediscovered photo of an afro-sporting Prince in his Bryant Junior High days, though, and Jany got hundreds…

As St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman stops by The Current's Morning Show to talk about exciting things happening in the capital city, we're wondering, what songs that name-check St. Paul or are about St. Paul places do you want to hear?